Race in Redistricting
Racial considerations in the redistricting process are unavoidable. Racial demographics are included in census data and even if they were not included, many line-drawers still have first-hand knowledge of the racial demographics of the neighborhoods they redistrict. Because of this, courts have warned that line-drawers must be mindful of how district boundaries affect race. Since each decision to place a boundary line directly affects a community, colorblind line-drawing can be just as harmful to a racial group as conscious manipulation.
The federal legal framework addressing race in redistricting has evolved considerably since the sixties. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Supreme Court precedent make up the bulk of the rules on race in redistricting. The court and certain provisions of the VRA work to balance the tension between political goals in redistricting and protecting the representational rights of minorities. The court has worked to protect not only minority voters but voters of every race from the diminution of their representational rights. Specific legal rules, however, do address intentional and unintentional minority vote dilution.
As an aggressive response to pervasive racial discriminatory practices against minority voters in many places in the country, the VRA was enacted to prevent minority disenfranchisement such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and many other tactics to discourage minority voters from exercising their 15th amendment right to vote. The most aggressive response was section 5 of the VRA, which required specific jurisdictions in the states to obtain prior approval, or preclearance from the Dept. of Justice (DOJ) or court—for any change in voting procedure. The reasoning was that these practices had been too effective at muting the vote of minority populations and that any system to check this behavior would have to prevent it from happening altogether. Redrawing political maps was an included activity under the preclearance regime.
Under preclearance, covered states and local jurisdictions had to submit redistricting maps to either the DOJ or the Federal District Court for Wash. DC. Most took the more convenient route of submitting map changes to the DOJ. Generally speaking, the newly drawn map could not dilute the political power of any protected minority group when compared to the existing map. In other words, a minority group could not fare worse under the new map.
As one might expect, many of these covered jurisdictions disputed the DOJ’s assessment and sued in court. As a result, there is a good 30 years or so of court precedent that interprets the provisions of section 5.
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